The Crisis of Modern Liberalism and the Conservative Argument

In the Summer edition of the Claremont Review of Books Jonah Goldberg reviews Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books and finds that much of modern conservative thought owes much to the influence of the Claremont Institute and its flagship publication (though it's certainly not anywhere close to as influential as it should be).  As Jonah notes, since its inception, the main project of the Claremont Institute has been to recover the natural right and natural law understandings that pervade both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  As Jonah explains:

At home or abroad, the fundamental question of the Constitution is how, in a free society, shall men use power over other men. The founders' answer was, in short, very carefully. That is why we have checks and balances, separation of powers, divided government, and all of the other mechanisms that make it hard for us to oppress one another. For this form of government to work, citizens must believe in self-government, an idea itself grounded in the framers' understanding of human nature as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. No other publication has more effectively or eloquently made that argument over a sustained period of time. This is all the more impressive given that they have done so without falling into cant or cliché. Each piece in this book—and in the magazine—reads like what it is: an honest and deep examination of the books and ideas that shape the intellectual climate. 

But even through the heydays of conservatism (or what's thought today to be its heyday) during the Reagan Revolution in the waning years of the Cold War, what made the diverging views of conservatism coalesce was a common enemy that manifested itself in the guise of the twin evils of communism and Marxism.  Now that this common enemy has been defeated for now, modern conservatism until recently had been largely more focused on what it was against rather than what it was for.  Politically, this changed in the 2010 election with the advent of the Tea Party and other organizations that began as a movement against "big government" and were for a return the Constitution and the principles of the American Founders.  The return to first principles coincides with Jonah's observation that the temporary Cold War coalition masked an ever-widening fissure in what later came to be called modern conservatism, or what began as the reaction against the Progressive Movement.

In the person of Barack Obama do we have a politician, along with the Democratic Party behind him, moving back to arguments of the earlier Progressives who openly called for an overturning of founding principles so that our country could instead be guided by the currents of History.  No longer being content with simply continuing on the rhetorical tradition that FDR had created and was sustained through Bill Clinton's presidency -- concealing radical critiques of the Constitution and its principles in speeches that seemed to suggest that they and the Democratic Party were following completely within the Founding tradition --, Obama returned to Osawatomie, Kansas and voiced arguments not heard in public since the days of long ago.

I will leave by quoting Charles Kesler, who nicely sums up what should supply the metaphysical grounding underneath the conservative counter argument:

Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke; others from Friedrich Hayek. While we respect both thinkers and their schools of thought, we begin instead from America, the American political tradition in all its genius and profundity, and the relation of our tradition to revealed wisdom and to what the elderly Jefferson once called, rather insouciantly, "the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." We think conservatism should take its bearings from the founders' statesmanship, our citizens' loyalty to the Declaration and Constitution, and the scenes, both tender and proud, of our national history.

Politcs as a Hammer

When I got into work this morning, I saw the following email from the Chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, Chris Redfern, in my inbox:

Dear Kyle,

There’s no way to sugarcoat this: If we lose this election, it means that our state can be bought by the highest bidder.

And make no mistake, if Ohio can be bought, this country can be bought.

Ohio is the tipping point, and the Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, and Wall Street special interests know it. Every dollar they spend to win here goes straight towards rolling back financial reforms, increasing the cost of education for our children, and increasing tax breaks for billionaires.

We’re just under 100 days away from Election Day and what we do right now will affect whether these groups continue to spend their millions here or fade away to concentrate on other targets. We must commit to defend Ohio today.

[...]

Total spending against Sherrod Brown now tops $13 million, and President Obama has been outraised by his opponents for two months straight. It’s clear that the special interests know where their bread is buttered and will use every dollar to distort facts and mislead everyday Americans.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines or waiting to get involved, now is the time. The only way to keep pace and fight back in this crucial election year is to raise a minimum of $25,000 for the Defend Ohio fund to help pay for literature and advertising as we move into the final stage of the campaign.

I urge you to get involved -- before it’s too late.

[...]

Without your help today, Obama and Sherrod will face an increased threat from these groups as they press their funding advantage. When grassroots supporters like you take action, it makes them reconsider the safety and size of their investment here.

[...]

It’s up to people like you and me to make the difference.

Thank you for all that you do,

Chris

Chris Redfern
Chairman
Ohio Democratic Party

The basic message:  If Democrats win, the people's voice was heard loud and clear.  If Republicans win, the people's voice was trampled upon by special interests (of course, as we all know, Democrats receive zero funding from any outside groups or special interests).

I don't know about you but that seems pretty persuasive to me...

Facts are Stubborn Things

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has now come to the defense of Sen. Harry Reid's indefensible accusations late last week that Mitt Romney has paid no taxes for the past ten years.  Here is her persuasive and logical argument:

"Harry Reid made a statement that is true. Somebody told him. It is a fact," Pelosi told The Huffington Post in a Sunday interview. "Whether he did or not can easily be disposed of: Mitt Romney can release his tax returns and show whether he paid taxes."

[...]

"The salience of what Harry Reid is saying is related" to the contents of Romney's tax plan, Pelosi said. "Here's a guy who wants you to pay more when I think, 'I' meaning Harry Reid, somebody told me he hasn't even paid his taxes. But he wants you to pay more to underwrite tax cuts for the wealthy. ... It's like a double doozy."

Well I heard through the grapevine through several different people who I trust who in turn heard it from several other people who they trust that Nancy Pelosi runs a drug running operation out of her house.  Must be true since I heard it from people I trust.

Newspeak

Marvin Olasky on what the media failed to report after US gymnast Gabby Douglas won gold on Thursday:

It was hard to miss yesterday the Christian beliefs that gave Gabby Douglas the foundation for all the work and concentration that went into her gold medal performance. Interviewed on television directly after her triumph, the gymnast said, “I give all the glory to God. It’s kind of a win-win situation. The glory goes up to him and the blessings fall down on me.”

Later Douglas tweeted, “Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things He does for me.” Earlier in the Olympics she had blogged for ESPN, “Gotta give God the Glory! Thank you everyone for praying for me! It means so much to me!”

[...]

Stories in USA Today and the Los Angeles Times didn’t mention it, nor did The New York Times story, but The Times did note that Douglas’ mother and the mom of the family she lived with in Iowa “shared religious beliefs.” The Times did not specify what those beliefs are.

The Christian Science Monitor also left out what is so important to Douglas, but it did quote her saying “’hard work really does pay off’ in the astonished tones of someone who had just bought a Ginsu knife and was shocked to learn that it really can cut tomatoes wafer-thin.” Good line.

Reporters are surprised and sometimes shocked to hear that faith in Christ (except among people they think are crazy) makes a difference. When I did a Nexis computerized search of “Gabby Douglas” and “Christian” in publications yesterday and today, only Agence France Presse came up: “Douglas, a devout Christian.” No major publication apparently quoted her “glory to God” remarks.

But that makes sense, within standard journalistic understandings. Newspaper space is limited: Why waste it by bringing up something irrelevant, even though the subject of the story benightedly thinks it important?

Pushing Old Ladies Around

Some words of wisdom from Jonah Goldberg in today's G-File on abortion and capital punishment:

I recently wrote about the death penalty and I've been getting annoying feedback ever since. I'm in favor of the death penalty for people who deserve to be put to death. I very much oppose the death penalty for people who do not deserve to be put to death. I phrase it this way because so many opponents of the death penalty love to point to innocent men who were sentenced to die as if proof of error in the system invalidates capital punishment in principle. I don't know if an innocent person has ever been executed, but even if one were that outrage (and it would be an outrage) no more invalidates the death penalty than an instance of friendly fire invalidates the need for a military.

Look at it this way: If in, say, Illinois they wrongly sent a man to death row does that make the Aurora killer any less deserving of the chair? Where is the transitive property here?

But that's not even why I'm talking about the death penalty. One of the more annoying rejoinders to any discussion of the death penalty is, as one e-mailer puts it: "You f***ing wingnuts are such hypocrites, you talk about being pro-life but you have no problem killing minorities when it suits you."

I find this category error mind-boggling. Now while I'm functionally pro-life for the most part, I am not conventionally so. But that's irrelevant given the charge of plenary incompatibility of the pro-life and pro-capital-punishment positions. 

First off, when a fetus shoots up a movie theater or rapes and kills a little girl or throws political dissidents into a wood chipper please be sure to shoot me an e-mail or tweet about it, because that sounds like an interesting story.

On that point, the argument against abortion hinges on the fact that it is the taking of an innocent life, often for selfish purposes. If you don't think it's a life worthy of respect that's something we can argue another day. The point here is that pro-lifers do think it is a life, an innocent life. And as I said at the outset, I'm in favor of the death penalty for people who deserve to be put to death. What has an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus done that it deserves to be put to death? The abortion-rights position holds that the uterine-occupant's crime is that, if allowed to be born, it will potentially inconvenience or harm the mother. Obviously, the issue of harming the mother is morally significant, but the inconvenience issue is much less so.

However you want to think about all of that, what's very clear is that the moral contexts of abortion and capital punishment are very, very different.

This is a good time to invoke William F. Buckley's old line about moral equivalence. If you have one man who pushes an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus and you have another man who pushes an old lady in front of an oncoming bus, it will simply not do to describe them both as the sorts of men who push old ladies around. Abortion renders a whole class of humans, non-human. Capital punishment says that a specific human being, one who has been proven to have taken another human life, is fit for execution. The death penalty may or may not be wrong, but to my mind it has as much in common with abortion as indexing capital gains or the infield fly rule. 

What I find fascinating is the way pro-abortion, anti-death-penalty types find this so hard to understand. Here's my theory: They think that pro-lifers suffer from magical thinking. A burning bush, or a guy in a white robe, or some mystical book told them to oppose abortion. The incantations surrounding this belief involve phrases like "sanctity of life" and "every life is sacred." And so they conclude that pro-lifers are being inconsistent by not extending the magic cloak of protection to serial killers, mass murderers, and child rapists.

Demagogue

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been lately throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks (or what the media will run with).  Here is his latest charge against Mitt Romney:

“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?

“You guys have said his wealth is $250 million,” Reid continued. “Not a chance in the world. It’s a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.”

This is all the more interesting in light of the fact that Harry Reid has refused to release his own tax returns...

Assessing Romney

When I got into work this morning, the first thing I saw was this Quinnipiac poll that was recently taken in key battleground states, including the all important state of Ohio.  The poll has Obama being up on Romney 50 - 44 in Ohio.

As soon as I saw the numbers, I was suspicious.  This post on Power Line confirmed them.  Polls in 2008 in Ohio showed Barack Obama being up at this point in the race by 15 points, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a 35 - 27 margin.  Obama took the state by 2.5 points. 

But with that aside, I am still not overly-optimistic about Mitt Romney's numbers, even though, as I showed above, they are not as bad as advertised.  With everything that has gone in the past three years from high unemployment to the ramming through of a still largely unpopular healthcare law, it just seems like Romney should be up in the polls.  Romney has no doubt done better lately (see this speech he gave in Israel), but he is still trying to fight the caricature Obama's team created about Romney, that he only cares about the rich, likes to fire people, and outsources jobs overseas (all charges by the way are false but they are probably still persuasive to the average voter).

This thought led to me to browse through a speech Calvin Coolidge gave in 1925 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.  Coolidge, in his time but certainly in much more recent times, has been given the same treatment Romney has only it has been done by historians.  To be sure, Coolidge talked about business in many speeches, but he was always careful to talk about in the context of natural rights, or the principles that undergird the American Republic.  Here is the key excerpt: 

There does not seem to be cause for alarm in the dual relationship of the press to the public, whereby it is on one side a purveyor of information and opinion and on the other side a purely business enterprise. Rather, it is probably that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life. The opposite view was oracularly and poetically set forth in those lines of Goldsmith which everybody repeats, but few really believe: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." Excellent poetry, but not a good working philosophy. Goldsmith would have been right, if, in fact, the accumulation of wealth meant the decay of men. It is rare indeed that the men who are accumulating wealth decay. It is only when they cease production, when accumulation stops, that an irreparable decay begins. Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture. Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well-nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it. An there never was time when wealth was so generally regarded as a means, or so little regarded as an end, as today (emphasis added).

Romney needs to do a better job in this, making the case constantly that the money made by business is not an end to itself; that no one is arguing for the ultra-individualist position Obama is implicitly arguing against; that the Republican position doesn't entail a simple love of big coporations; that a just government does not take the bread from the mouth of one man to feed another.  I don't want to leave the impression that Romney has not done these things, but he could certainly do much better.